The mantra from everyone about the Iraq war – opponents, proponents, world leaders, and the intelligence community – is that there were no weapons of mass destruction found and no link between Al Qaeda, state-sponsored terrorism and the Iraqi regime. It’s all a load of horse pucky.
Evidence of WMD and links to Al Qaeda are abundant and readily available, even to blind democrats. And what’s available through open sources is just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of other reports that, for national security reasons, have not been made available to the public, but they are well known to Congressional members and staff, some of whom have selectively leaked both accurate and inaccurate accounts.
So let’s get to it. It will seem boring and technical and will lose anyone with the attention span of a Member of Congress or someone who reads People Magazine and thinks they just read a novel.
Iraq’s connection to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups has been around for decades but it’s rarely talked about. For years, Iraqi intelligence recruited terrorists for training from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Chechnya, recnetly most of them Al Qaeda members. They were trained at the Saad military camp located northeast of Baghdad which at times housed as many as 2,500 foreigners who were trained in urban warfare, bomb making, kidnapping, and “specialized urban warfare,” a euphemism for spectacular terrorism such as chemical and biological attacks in the U.S. and Europe. The base was run by Qusay Hussein’s own Special Security known as Amn Khass. The fiercest group of terrorists fighters were trained by Uday Hussein’s Saddam’s Fedayeen Call and was comprised by 700 Algerian members of the Salafist Brigade for Combat and Call. This group was so brutal and unstable that they reported to nobody and were left to do as they wished after the training. Fortunately, once the U.S. and Britain began attacking Iraq in March 2002, most of the Algerians approached U.S. troops in broad daylight and were taken out by air strikes.
Saddam himself encouraged further terrorism against Israel by paying $25,000 to the surviving family members of any suicide bomber who detonated themselves in Israel. This came at a time when the Palestinians began the 2001 Intifada, giving further incentive to strap on the latest in Palestinian fashion. Once Saddam was attacked, the money stopped and suicide attacks were dramatically reduced.
Iraq mixed terrorism and WMD too. In September of 2002, Israeli soldiers captured three members of the Arab Liberation Front who were attempting to cross the Jordan River and enter the Palestinian territory. During their interrogation, the three admitted they were trained in Iraq at a base known as Salman Pak by Iraqi military intelligence. The three were specifically trained to use shoulder-launched missiles to aim at planes landing at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport. They further admitted that there was a second training facility in which all participants were Al Qaeda members who were being trained in chemical warfare, specifically the use of ricin. The interrogators learned that these operatives were trained to carry out missions on a U.S. base in Turkey, several attacks inside Europe and to help the Chechens in their battle with the Russians. The information was corroborated by other intelligence sources and the plots were thwarted in Turkey and Europe but not in Russia as several Iraqi-trained Chechen and Arab terrorists seized a theater in Moscow and rigged it with explosives, threatening to kill everyone inside. More than 200 people, including the terrorists, were killed when the Russians used a nerve agent to knock out the terrorists before they could detonate the bombs. Unfortunately many of the hostages died from secondary problems related to the nerve agent.
For these reasons and many more, I think it’s safe to say Saddam supported and gave safe haven to terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. The training the regime gave was not intended for the defense of Iraq, but rather to prepare soldiers for attacks aimed at the West and Israel. None of this is guesswork or unknown. It was written down in detail in papers left behind by the fleeing Saddam and his top leaders, including his two sons. All the above information has also been reported in several U.S. newspapers and magazines and much of it was included in the Congressional 9/11 report. In other words, no honest politician or journalist (assuming there are some left) can say or write that there was no link to Saddam and agents of terror.
The same is true about Weapons of Mass Destruction. The information to follow has also been written about for the past three years and, while you have to dig a bit deeper for some of it, it’s all been in open-sourced publications and de-classified reports.
As Baghdad was falling, hundreds of drums of sarin gas and mustard gas were discovered. It was reported in May 2003 in the New York Times that the drums contained enough sarin gas to kill more than one million people.
In April of 2003, a U.S. Marine Corps unit identified high concentration of mustard gas and cyanide in the Euphrates near Nasiriyah along with hundreds of gas masks and chemical warfare suits at a nearby military base. This suggests the Iraqis dumped their WMD ammunition into the river once they realized the fall of the city was imminent.
Still, these reports never served as enough proof that there were the expected wholesale stockpiles of WMD. There remain only two logical conclusions for this: Iraq did not have huge amounts of WMD; or it did possess them and either destroyed them or shipped them out of the country. There is certainly more evidence that the later was true and that Syria played a significant role.
During numerous U.S. bombing raids, an area around al-Qaim was largely untouched. The reason for this was the assumption that Iraq’s main biological and chemical weapon stockpiles were stored under camouflaged hangars and in the heavy brush around the base. Once American forces got close to al-Qaim, intense activities were observed in the thick foliage along the Euphrates. Under cover of darkness, numerous large objects, tanks, and containers were moved from their hiding places and tracked by drones and U.S. jest being taken across the border to Syria.
On April 5, Saddam failed to show up for an advertised address on Iraqi TC. The regime was falling and Saddam’s family had already fled on a flight to Belarus. Saddam was close behind. Elements of the Russian GRU were in Baghdad quickly destroying all pertinent intelligence data collected through a close relationship with the regime. They were the first to know that Saddam was part of a group of Republican Guard and other units of the regular army from the Tikrit area who were on their way to Syria. As reported by the GRU, the fleeing convoy including three hundred tanks, one hundred GRAD multiple-barrel rocket launchers, many which had chemical warheads, and many other weapons systems, including Iraq’s entire remaining WMD arsenal. The report suggests Saddam was in Damascus for a short time before returning to Tikrit.
Once the fall of Iraq was clear, the Syrians worked diligently to cover their complicity in transferring WMD systems into Iraq. They began to move and hide the WMD that had entered Syria during the last days of the regime to permanent locations inside a maze of tunnels and other permanent stockpile sites in northern Lebanon and central Syria.
According to numerous sources, the concealment of the Iraqi WMD was under the command of General Zou al-Himma al-Shaleesh, a veteran of Syrian-Iraqi strategic cooperation and smuggling. Assaf Shawqat, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law and deputy chief of Syrian military intelligence, personally supervised the undertaking. The first specific account of this action to transfer and hide Iraqi WMD was provided by Syrian opposition journalist Nizar Nayyouf on the basis of maps and notes he had received from a “Syrian senior officer who had become a dissident.” Several Lebanese, Syrian and other Arab intelligence sources later confirmed Nayyouf’s reports and provided additional details about the whereabouts of Iraq’s WMD.
First to be moved were the large tanks containing chemical materials that were put on flatbed trucks and moved to areas of northeastern Lebanon under Syrian military control and buried in deep pits near Hermel and in the northern Bekaa valley. The Iraqi operational weapons and other sensitive military components were transferred to three sites associated with comparable Syrian military activities. Most other items were moved via flatbed trucks or rail cars with the most dangerous and sensitive materials transferred by ambulance. Much of this is stored in the complex tunnel system controlled by Bureau 489 of the Cipher and Document Security Division of Syrian Intelligence – the agency responsible for the security of Syria’s most sensitive facilities. Vital parts of Iraq’s WMD munitions were stored in a Syrian Air Force munitions factory near the village of Tal Sinan.
This has been independently confirmed by several intelligence sources, not all working on the same side. In fact, a recent report from a U.N. source indicates that President Bashar is attempting to leverage the Iraqi WMD to have the U.N. put aside its investigation into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The negotiations are modeled after the deal struck by Lybian Leader Moammar Gadhafi so he was able to have sanctions removed.
If the U.N. takes the easy route on this – a likely scenario – there will be little doubt left about the origins of the WMD stockpiles. Whether anyone will be willing to admit it is altogether another story. To be honest, I’m not one of those who need the smoking-gun proof that others need. President Bush was handed a choice in September, 2001: treat the 9/11 attacks as a crime and convict all 19 hijackers posthumously or consider the larger scope and realize that we have been under assault from fundamentalist Wahabi Muslims since 1993. President Bush and a majority of Members of Congress opted for the later approach and, while nobody thinks the prosecution of this war or any war is perfect, we’ve accomplished at least one goal in that, knock on wood, there have been no other attacks on targets within the U.S.
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